Parts of this conversation made me wish to weep. If we can
begin to grapple with the profundity of what Ivan Illich is saying about friendship,
we will have enriched our lives one hundred fold. Here is a conversation between
three men that explores how to gain access to a way of being from which technological
screens and mechanical interfacing has cut us off.

The idea that people are born with needs, that needs can
be translated into rights, that these rights can be translated into entitlements,
is a development of the modem world...

Illich: During the late sixties I had
a chance to give a dozen addresses to people who were concerned with education and
schooling. I asked myself, since when are people born needy? In need, for instance,
of education? Since when do we have to learn the language we speak by being taught
by somebody? I wanted to find out where the idea came from that all over the world
people have to be assembled in specific groups of not less than fifteen, otherwise
it's not a class, not more than forty, otherwise they are underprivileged, for yearly,
not less than 800 hours, otherwise they don't get enough, not more than 1,100 hours,
otherwise it's considered a prison, for four-year periods by somebody else who has
undergone this for a longer time. How did it come about that such a crazy process
like schooling would become necessary? Then I realized that it was something like
engineering people, that our society doesn't only produce artifact things, but artifact
people. And that it doesn't do that by the content of the curriculum, but by getting
themthrough this ritual which makes them believe that learning happens as
a result of being taught; that learning can be divided into separate tasks; that
learning can be measured and pieces can be added one to the other; that learning
provides value for the objects which then sell in the market.

And it's true. The more expensive the schooling of a person, the more money he
will make in the course of his life. This in spite of the certainty, from a social
science point of view, that there's absolutely no relationship between the curriculum
content and what people actually do satisfactorily for themselves or society in life.
That we know, since that beautiful book by Ivar Berg, The Great Training Robbery.
In the meantime, there are at least thirty or forty other studies, all of which
show the same thing. The curricular content has absolutely no effect on how people
perform. The latent function of schooling, that is, the hidden curriculum, which
forms individuals into needy people who know that they have now satisfied a little
bit of their needs for education, is much more important.

Not all people whom I knew as a young man had needs. We were hungry but we couldn't
translate the hunger into a need for food stuff. We were hungry for a tortilla, for
comida, not calories. The idea that people are born with needs, that needs
can be translated into rights, that these rights can be translated into entitlements,
is a development of the modem world and it's reasonable, it's acceptable, it's obvious
only for people who have had some of their educational needs awakened or created,
then satisfied, and then learned that they have less than others. Schooling, which
we engage in and which supposedly creates equal opportunities, has become the unique,
never-before-attempted way of dividing the whole society into classes. Everybody
knows at which level of his twelve or sixteen years of schooling he has dropped out,
and in addition knows what price tag is attached to the higher schooling he has gotten.
It's a history of degrading the majority of people.

Brown: So you take somebody who's poor and you modernize the poverty by
not only having a person that doesn't have a lot of material goods but now lacks
the mental self-confidence that his father or grandfather had before that.

Illich: And I can create a world for him in which he constantly
needs something: context-sensitive help. You know, when you are in front of a computer
and when you are in that program and put in WordPerfect it tells you what help you
need at the point you are at. We have created a world in which people constantly
are grateful if they are taken by the hand to know how to use a knife or to use the
coffee maker or how to go on from here in text composing.

Increasingly people live in an artifact and become artifacts themselves, feel
satisfied, feel fit for that artifact insofar as they themselves have been manipulated.
That is the reason why the two of us concern ourselves with the things in the world
as they are, as determinants of the possibility of friendship, of being really face
to face with each other. Usually the people who do the philosophy of things, of artifacts,
of technology, are concerned about what technology does to society. Inevitably modern
technology has polarized society. It has polluted the environment. It has disabled
very simple native abilities and made people dependent on objects.

Brown: Like an automobile.

Illich: An automobile which cuts out the use value from your feet.
Like an automobile which makes the world inaccessible, when actually in Latin "automobile"
means "using your feet to get somewhere." The automobile makes it unthinkable.
I was recently told, "You're a liar!" when I said to somebody I walked
down the spine of the Andes. Every Spaniard in the sixteenth, seventeenth century
did that. The idea that somebody could just walk! He can jog perhaps in the morning,
but he can't walk anywhere! The world has become inaccessible because we drive there

[Objects and artifacts] change who you are and, even more deeply, the way your senses
work. Traditionally the gaze was conceived as a way of fingering, of touching. The
old Greeks spoke about looking as a way of sending out my psychopodia, my soul's
limbs, to touch your face and establish a relationship between the two of us. This
relationship was called vision. Then, after Galileo, the idea developed that the
eyes are receptors into which light brings something from the outside, keeping you
separate from me even when I look at you. People began to conceive of their eyes
as some kind of camera obscura. In our age people conceive of their eyes and actually
use them as if they were part of a machinery. They speak about interface. Anybody
who says to me, "I want to have an interface with you," I say, "please
go somewhere else, to a toilet or wherever you want, to a mirror." Anybody who
says, "I want to communicate with you," I say, "Can't you talk? Can't
you speak? Can't you recognize that there's a deep otherness between me and you,
so deep that it would be offensive for me to be programmed in the same way you are."

Today my main concern is in which way... technology has
devastated the road from one to the other, to friendship.

Mitcham: As Ivan has pointed out, we are undergoing a fundamental
transformation in what he referred to as "context-sensitive help" screens.
We spend more time now in front of a screen of one kind or another than we used to
spend face to face with other humans beingseither the screen of the television set,
the screen of the computer, the screen of my little digital clock right here in front
of me. And we begin to experience the world, like when we're driving in a car the
windshield becomes a kind of screen. The world becomes flattened to that screen.

Illich: I found at the Penn State Library a report on the Texas
meeting of windshield technicians. Last year there were three volumes with some 870
contributions about how to engineer the windshield view which always makes you be
where you're not yet. You're looking at what lies ahead, where you are not yet, like
when you are with somebody and he always wants to know where we will be next week,
where we will be the next hour, instead of being right here. It makes facing each
other increasingly more difficult because people can't detach themselves anymore
from the idea that what we look at has been manipulated and programmed by somebody.

Until quite recently, all cultures which we know of were determined by the idea
of hierarchy being natural, being a given. Hierarchy being something in which I live,
which I have to learn to suffer. The [hierarchical] human condition can be that of
the tropics or of a cold climate; of a very highly sophisticated Greek politaea
with slavery or God knows what horrors, or of a monastery in the twelfth century.

People didn't speak of a "culture." The word didn't exist. But they
spoke about the style of the art of suffering that they had here and not somewhere
else. Somewhere else people knew how to suffer that human condition
in their own style. All this has been blown away.

The two of us haven't seen each other for a year now, and when we saw each other
we bowed in front of each other. This very idea of bowingyou don't bow in front of
a screen. It's made impossible, or very difficult, for people who constantly see
non-persons on the screen. I remember the day when that kid told me, "Yes, but
I did see, this evening, Kennedy, and then President Bush, and then also E.T."
For goodness sake, I am not something like them. I am somebody who wants to respect
you, who wants to look up to you. This has been deeply undermined.

The world has lost our sense of proportionality, the sense that our friendship
is not Jerry-plus lvan-and-some-interaction-between-them, as if we were two screens,
two programs, two machines, but something which is beautiful in itself. That sense
seems to me something that I would like to save. I can't do that in politics. I can't
do that in public life. I can do that only by cultivating, when we get together around
spaghetti and a glass of wine.

I am surrounded for the first time in my life with people over twenty-five who
were born in the year, or shortly after the year, when I had the experience of what
is called medically, in America, a "depression" of two weeks. I called
it melancholia. I called it acedia, which is the inactivity which results from a
man seeing how enormously difficult it is for a man to do the right thing. In good
English: sloth. I had a period of very black sloth and didn't want to continue writing
on that book Tools for Conviviality.

I understood what it meant to have to move into the world of the technological
shell of which we spoke before. And now these people have been born in that age.
I can speak differently to these people than I could speak to people of the sixties.
In I968, when I made people aware of the horrors inevitably effected by sickening
medicine, because it creates more sick people than it can help, by stupefying education
of which we just spoke, by time-consuming acceleration of traffic so that the majority
of people have to spend many more hours in traffic jams in order to make a few people
like you and me, and perhaps even Mitcham, omnipresent on radio, that was our main
concern. Today my main concern is in which wayand these people understand ittechnology
has devastated the road from one to the other, to friendship. Yet it is not our task
to run out into the world to help others who are less privileged than we are. Some
people must do this and I must collaborate with it. The real task is to remove from
my own mind the screen.

It is from your eye that I find myself... It is not my mirror.
It is you making me the gift of that which Ivan is for you.

Brown: You had a focus on these larger societal issues, and now you're
coming to focus in recent years on more immediate friendship. I'm very struck by
the fact that you say computers communicate but people talk. I think the same thing
is also true of the word "relationship." You can have a relationship among
instruments or between instruments, but you can only have a friendship between two
people or among human beings. I guess one of the obvious points about the modern
sophisticated world would be the technological terms that invade our own understanding
of ourselves and our immediate life.

In this book that Ivan has written, In theVineyard of the Text, he
called my attention to footnote 53, which is from the Latin, by Hugh of St. Victor,
where he says love never ends:

To my dear brother Ronolfe, from Hugh, a sinner. Love never ends. When I first
heard this I knew it was true. But now, dearest brother, I have the personal experience
fully knowing that love never ends. For I was a foreigner. I met you in a strange
land. But that land was not really strange for I found friends there. I don't know
whether I first made friends or was made one, but I found love there and I loved
it and I could not tire of it for it was sweet to me and I filled my heart with It
and was sad that my heart could hold so little. I could not take in all that there
was but I took in as much as I could. I filled up all the space l had but I could
not fit in all I found, so I accepted what I could and, weighed down with this precious
gift, I didn't feel any burden because my full heart sustained me. And now, having
made a long journey, I find my heart still warmed and none of the gift has been lost,
for love never ends.

I do think that if I had to choose one word to which hope
can be tied, it is hospitality.

Illich: It's so beautiful. Today we would immediately say if a man
writes to a man like that he must be a gay. But if he writes to a woman they would
say what a marvellous sexual relationship. But do I need these alienating concepts?
I want to just go back to a great rabbinical and also, as you see, monastic, Christian
development beyond what the Greeks like Plato or Cicero already knew about friendship.
That it is from your eye that I find myself. There's a little thing there. They called
it pupilla, a "puppet" of myself which I can see in your eye. The black
thing in your eye.

Pupil, puppet, person, eye. It is not my mirror. It is you making me the gift
of that which Ivan is for you. That's the one who says "I" here. I'm purposely
not saying, this is my person, this is my individuality, this is my ego. No. I'm
saying this is the one who answers you here, whom you have given to him. This is
how St. Hugh explains it here. This is how the rabbinical tradition explains it.
That I cannot come to be fully human unless I have received myself as a gift and
accepted myself as a gift of somebody who has, as we say today, distorted me the
way you distorted me by loving me.

Now, friendship in the Greek tradition, in the Roman tradition, in the old tradition,
was always viewed as the highest point which virtue can reach. Virtue, meaning here,
"the habitual facility of doing the good thing," which is fostered by what
the Greeks called politaea, political life, community life. I know it was
a political life in which I wouldn't have liked to participate, with the slaves around
and with the women excluded, but I still have to go to Plato or to Cicero. They conceived
of friendship as a supreme flowering, of the interaction which happens in a good
political society. But I do not believe that friendship today can flower out, can
come out, of political life. I do believe that if there is something like a political
life to be, to remain for us, in this world of technology, then it begins with friendship.

Therefore my task is to cultivate disciplined, self-denying, careful, tasteful
friendships. Mutual friendships always. I-and-you and, I hope, a third one, out of
which perhaps community can grow. Because perhaps here we can find what the good
is.

To make it short, while once friendship in our western tradition was the supreme
flower of politics, I think that if community life exists at all today, it is in
some way the consequence of friendship cultivated by each one who initiates it. This
goes beyond anything which people usually talk about, saying each one of you is responsible
for the friendships he/she can develop, because society will only be as good as the
political result of these friendships. This is, of course, a challenge to the idea
of democracy [as a necessary political context for friendships to bloom].

Brown: We started with a world where the good society creates virtue and
virtue is the basis of friendship. Now it's reversed. Now we have to create the friendship
and, in the context of the friendship, virtue is practised and that might lead to
a community which might lead to a society which might be a whole other kind of politics.

Mitcham: In some sense that's what you're trying to do, Jerry, with We
the People. You've created a context, at your place in Oakland, in which what comes
first is your friendship with other people and the friendship, the relations, between
the people of that community. And out of that may grow some politics, but what I
experienced when I visited We the People is primarily your hospitality and the hospitality
of others there with you.

Illich: Here is the right word: hospitality was a condition consequent
on a good society in politics, politaea, and by now might be the starting point of
politaea, of politics. But this is difficult because hospitality requires a threshold
over which I can lead you. TV, the Internet, newspapers, the idea of communication,
abolished the walls between inside and outside, and therefore also the friendship,
the possibility of leading somebody over the door. Hospitality requires a table around
which you can sit and if people get tired they can sleep. You have to belong to a
subculture to say, we have a few mattresses here. Hospitality is deeply threatened
by the idea of personality, of [educational] status. I do think that if I had to
choose one word to which hope can be tied, it is hospitality. A practice of hospitality
recovering threshold, table, patience, listening, and from there generating seedbeds
for virtue and friendship on the one hand. On the other hand, radiating out for possible
community, for rebirth of community.

I have to make my mind up whom I will take into my arms,
to whom I will lose myself, whom I will treat as a vis-a-vis, that face into which
I look, which I lovingly touch with my fingering gaze, from whom I accept being who
I am as a gift.

Brown: I know you've written about the story of the Good Samaritan
who is my neighbour and now we come up to this world of the needs, the rights, and
the institution to take care of all that. Can you say a little bit about what institutionalization
does, and then this reality that we're discussingof friendship, of love, of basing
anything we might want to call community on that very immediate, unconstrained, uninstitutionalized
way of being together?

Illich: Hospitality, that is, the readiness to accept somebody who is not
from our hut, [across to] this side of our threshold, to this bed in here, seems
to be, among the characteristics which anthropologists can identify, one of the most
universal, if the not the most universal. But hospitality, wherever it appears, distinguishes
between those who are Hellenes and those who are "blabberous," barbarians.
Hospitality primarily refers to Hellenes who believed there is an outside and an
inside. Hospitality is not for humans in general. Then comes that most upsetting
guy, Jesus of Nazareth, and by speaking about something extraordinarily great and
showing it in example, he destroys something basic.

When they ask him, "Who is my neighbour?" he tells about a Jew beaten up
in a hold-up and a Palestinian (called a Samaritan, he came from Samaria, actually
he's a Palestinian). First two Jews walk by and don't notice the beaten Jew. Then
the Palestinian walks by, sees that Jew, takes him into his own arms, does what Hellenic
hospitality does not obligate him to, and treats him as a brother. This breaking
of the limitations of hospitality to a small in-group, of offering it to the broadest
possible in-group, and saying, you determine who your guest is, might be taken as
the key message of Christianity.

Then in the year 300 and something, finally the Church got recognition. The bishops
were made into something like magistrates. The first things those guys do, these
new bishops, is create houses of hospitality, institutionalizing what was given to
us as a vocation by Jesus, as a personal vocation, institutionalizing it, creating
roofs, refuges, for foreigners. Immediately, very interesting, quite a few of the
great Christian thinkers of that time, I600 years ago (John Chrysostom is one), shout:
"If you do that, if you institutionalize charity, if you make charity or hospitality
into an act of a non-person, a community, Christians will cease to remain famous
for what we are now famous for, for having always an extra mattress, a crust of old
bread and a candle, for him who might knock at our door." But, for political
reasons, the Church became, from the year 400 or 500 on, the main device for roughly
a thousand years of proving that the State can be Christian by paying the Church
to take care institutionally of small fractions of those who had needs, relieving
the ordinary Christian household of the most uncomfortable duty of having a door,
having a threshold open for him who might knock and whom I might not choose.

This is what I speak about as institutionalization of charity, the historical
root of the idea of services, of the service economy. Now, I cannot imagine such
a system being reformable, even though it might be your task and the task of courageous
people whom I greatly admire. The impossible task they take on is towork
at its reform, at making the evils the service system carries with it as small as
possible. What I would have chosen is to awaken in us the sense of what this Palestinian
example meant. I can choose. I have to choose. I have to make my mind up whom I will
take into my arms, to whom I will lose myself, whom I will treat as that vis-a-vis,
that face into which I look, which I lovingly touch with my fingering gaze, from
whom I accept being who I am as a gift.

Born in Vienna, Ivan Illich currently divides his time among Mexico, Germany,
and the US. His latest book is In the Vineyard of the Text, (University of
Chicago paperback, 1996).

Jerry Brown, governor of California from 1974 to 1982, practices community
level organizing through his Oakland-based organization, We the People.

Carl Mitcham is professor at Penn State University.

This article was excerpted with permission from Brown's radio program, also
called "We the People" (March 22, 1996, Pacifica Network). It was published
in Whole Earth Review No.90 Summer 1997. Whole Earth is published quarterly
by Point, a nonprofit educational organisation located at 1408 Mission Avenue., San
Rafael, CA 94901 (415-256-2800)